Old Cultures - Yhiznel Chavez, Bria Johnson, Evelyn, Edgar M, Roxana Ortiz

Sacred beliefs

“With few exceptions, most Native American cultures did not have our notions as part of their collective mythos. Instead of the story that we’re “separate from creation and born to dominate it,” these cultures hold a different view of the place of humans in the order of creation:

• We are part of the world.
• It is our destiny to cooperate with the rest of creation. Every life-form has its special purpose in the grand ecosystem, and all are to be respected (176).”

The Shoshone culture - “Throughout their lives, they had to be aware of the spirits of nature and the worlds beyond nature that surrounded them, to monitor their interactions with others for appropriateness , keep a mental record of obligations and past interactions with family and other clans, and know where the sacred and profane places were so they could be visited or avoided (183).”

“We can learn many of these lessons simply by reconnecting to the wisdom of our ancestors

• They lived a life of “spiritual ecology” from a view of the sacred nature of all creation.
• They taught and still teach specific ways we can wake up to life (231).”

“Achieve Presence- Different people achieve this by different routes, but all methods have the effect of shutting down the thinking apparatus, which then allows our true consciousness to wake up and look around and see, hear, feel, taste, and smell the world (256).”

“When we understand this--finding that quiet place within where thinking ends and consciousness begins--is the most important goal and purpose of meditation, then it’s easier to understand and use the various forms of meditation (257)."

Last hours of ancient sunlight  solutions

• Look to the past: if we look to the past we see that all civilizations have fallen, all the empires have collapsed but we also see that for thousands of years we lived harmoniously with the planet, if we learn about what our ancestors did wrong and what they did right it will help us coexist with our planet.
• Women: while the younger culture has the idea that women are inferior than men, older cultures value women and see everybody as equal, some even venerate women and see them as sacred, thus they see the world as a mother.   
• Change our stories: the stories that we tell ourselves affect our beliefs, and our beliefs affect our actions and our experiences. “The culture we’re born into, the role we play in that culture, our family birth order and circumstances, our race and gender, our social status or wealth: all of these things affect the stories we tell ourselves, which define and circumscribe our experience of reality” (Hartmann 249).
• Everyone has to participate: people need to invest time to know what’s going on in the world and those who know must let others know. In young cultures T.V. and other things distract people from participating, in older cultures everyone had a responsibility, they had healers, hunters and everyone cooperated, they had a community to rely on and the community relied in its members. “The most successful communities I have known over the past years are those with a shared vision that is put into action” (Hartmann 316).
• Sacred: we must stop destroying the world. Younger culture has made evident that it does not care about the world but instead it cares about it’s value. Older culture saw the planet as a sacred place, they took what they needed and nothing more, they saw everything in the world as an extension of themselves and they treated everything with respect.

   

The way we live, what can we do, how should we live? We are not doing enough, not only that but we haven’t yet decided whether we want to solve the problem, ignore it, or keep living the way we are. People who control the oil industry don’t help out much because it’s not beneficial for them. We are destroying the world and everything in it including a way of life that has been around longer than civilization itself. Tribes around the world have had a hard time continuing their way of life when every second they are in the merciless hands of civilization. Thousands, millions of tribes have been eliminated, destroy, killed, genocide, died from modern diseases all done by civilization, from Columbus destroying many tribes in the Caribbean to the U.S. genocidal rampage against the Native Americans in the manifest destiny, the destruction of their habitat in America, Africa, India, China, and almost every other continent forcing them to join or die. The few tribes that have survived the genocides, the diseases and have avoided civilizations still face threats from climate change, the depletion of resources and the deforestation of the places that they live in so whilst they’ve avoided contact with modern people, modern people still affect them in other ways. Loggers, ranchers and people who control the oil industry don’t help out because it’s not in their economic and political interest.

Tribes have been around a lot longer than civilizations they have knowledge that we have “forgotten”  perhaps we should ask tribes if it’s possible for more of the 7 billion of us to live a more meaningful life spiritually, connected, and harmoniously with the world. How can we achieve togetherness and share a connection with everything in order to live together?  We need to act now to save ourselves from a catastrophe. Tribes like the Awa in Brazil who have lived there for thousands of years isolated from civilization but affected by it. In a 2013 article by Alex Shoumatoff and Sebastião Delgado: The Last of Eden shows how the deforestation of Brazil’s rainforest is endangering tribes of the Amazon and the Awa are now on red alert and have become the worlds most endangered tribe. Loggers, ranchers and invasores (people who take their lands and settle there) have continually attack the Awa and their environment. “Much of the land in Maranhão is owned by a small oligarchy of extremely wealthy ranchers who have their hands in much of the logging and are not sympathetic to the Indians” (Shoumatoff 1). The world should look at how the Brazilian government handled this situation by sending troops to protect the Awa lands and to expel loggers. Thought some Awa people of new generations have lost hope, Alex Shoumatoff quotes “Why are we risking our lives when they’re going to lose their culture anyway? Whenever I leave this place, I weep” (Shoumatoff 3). So there still work to do, we need to understand that the Awa people like other tribes don’t need our “civilized, sophisticated life and easy way of living” they are not interested in our culture or ideas; in fact they don’t want them, they want to stay in tribes and live the way they live.      

    

The San tribes of Africa, they were enslaved and made renounce their language and culture. People who bought lands where the San people roamed decided that they would take care of the San people; they torture them and made the San people respect them through fear.

The San people believed that the universe created the world and when it created the world it filled it with healing because it knew that man would “have violations in their hearts”. When Jen a San man cuts herbs from the ground he doesn’t take all of it, he returns some to the earth, and he takes some of his hair and puts it in the ground as a sign of respect and thanking the earth. The San People saw the world as a sacred place full of healing elements. One of the most important plants was the Hoodia (Hoodia is a plant that suppresses the appetite by fooling the body into believing it’s full), which is taken away from them to be use in medicine, one of the corporations using Hoodia is the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research in Pretoria, and many other that use it as “miracle medicine” using it to lose weight and it is the same corporations that make the world obese.

The San people want to stay where they are and they didn’t want any contact with other people because they saw that civilizations destroy the world around them in every way imaginable. Some tribes had no option but to join civilization, some of the San people started selling crafts to tourist but it wasn’t because they wanted to and they search meaningfulness in alcohol like many tribes around the world that had been taken from their land or conquered. One individual said “Today I sit in the craft stall to sell my things. To exercise my tradition. But that’s not the way. Because today, that bottle over there…it’s contents are made by machines. The money we earn at the stalls, you use to buy that bottle, to kill his brain…his thoughts, his memory…my wish is to fight back so that my child’s children’s , children can see the footsteps, the path” Youtube.InternalizedConflict(Quoted. Rehad Desai). When people are stripped away from their culture, their identity, they must find something that carries them, something that makes them feel good, many times they resort to drugs and alcohol. We see that every day in cities like the ones that we live in, that we work in where people do not fit into the society that we’ve created and that is supposed to make life easier for everyone.

The Shoshone another tribe of nomads were given lands by the U.S. government and then it was taken away. The Shoshone felt like it was important to share the land because it was common.  Land represents life, and the U.S. is taking away the life of the Shoshone “it’s a spiritual death” says Carrie Dann a Shoshone woman living in a reservation. The Shoshone had been living in America for at least ten thousand years. They had great respect towards other tribes, and towards the land which they shared with the Paiute in areas which are now Idaho, Oregon and Nevada, after the U.S. took those territories the Shoshone were sent to a reservation called the Duck Valley Reservation in the borders of Nevada and Idaho. The Shoshone only spent two hours a day searching for food, the rest of the day was spent in the telling of stories, playing games and making music. All tribes have an established complex religion and culture opposed to beliefs that they are savages that spent their lives surviving and struggling, looking for food, and starving to death when they didn’t find any. Most tribes had a lot of leisure time in most places around the world, especially in areas where food was abundant. In the book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Thomas Hartmann explains “As the seasons changed and food became scarce in one place they simply moved to another. If one food wasn’t available, they knew where and how to find another” (Hartmann 181). This is how the Shoshone and other tribes managed to live for thousands of years. The U.S. is a young civilization compare to others in the past. The world need to take a look at how our ancestors lived in order to know what we can do to sustain life in the future, how to achieve connectedness with the world and become a society that respects the universe and everything in it.      

In a summary of a lecture by professor Chris Rhodes What Happens When the Oil Runs Out describing the dangers, and how fast it may run out, one of the solutions was and perhaps an inevitable thing that may happen is “a metamorphosis of human civilization from the global to the local…by building strong, resilient communities in which people share their skills and knowledge” it is clear that if we don’t change our ways of living there would be nowhere to live left in the planet. What we do it’s not enough, we need to do more, research more, become aware, participate more and respect each other. It’s hard to think about life without cars, and many other objects that we have now days but we must do it, or find ways to keep them and at the same time become more aware of nature and its importance but we need to decide now what we are going to do.

We need to rethink, reinvent ourselves and our society before it’s too late, the people in power don’t care about anyone or anything other than in their profits and the control they have over people. We must wake up to reality; we must stop dreaming with our eyes open and remember our old ways of living.

For more info please refer to:

The Last of Eden by Alex Shoumatoff and Sebastião Delgado

Earth’s most threatened tribe by .survivalinternational.org

Our Land, Our Life by Oxfam America (youtube.com/user/oxfamamerica/videos)

History of Africa the true story by rebirth.co.za

Shoshone Paiute History by Reddy 1002 (youtube.com/user/reddy1002/videos)

History/ Shoshone-Paiute Tribes History by shopaitribes.org/culture/  

Native America before European Colonization by Thomas NativeHistory (youtube.com/user/TheNativeHistorian/videos)

Native Tribes of Britain by BBC (bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/british_prehistory/iron_01.shtml#eleven)

Before Civilization Human Ancestors by sites.google.com/site/1ancientcivilizationsforkids/

Dying life of the tribe by photographer Jimmy Nelson and reporter Daniel Miller.

What Happens When the Oil Runs Out by Professor Chris Rhodes.

Earth’s Ozone Layer Is Recovering by Gail Sullivan.

The Crash of 2016 by Thom Hartmann (found in youtube.com/user/politicsprose/videos)

Why ADHD is Not a Disorder | Interview with Thom Hartmann by Abby Martin (found in youtube.com/user/breakingtheset/videos)

City States vs Tribes:

How City-states might have started:

1. In prehistory, a tribal leader violated the tribal worldwide because of a weather change poor crops were produced in the area, and his people were hungry. He and his tribes attacked and conquered a nearby tribe. From that moment, warfare and genocide was invented.
2. Enslaving nearby tribes, and he instilled fear in his own people because of his willingness to use violence. Dominating, fear-based leadership was invented.
3. Taking a portion from each member and share his surplus to closet to him in order to maintain his domination. Wealth and the use of capital were invented.
4. He looked women were high esteem because of bringing a new life, having a power to make men want them. So, he decreed that women must be controlled. Then, sexual domination and patriarchal hierarchy were invented.
5. He asked his people to believe his words and allow to join the tribe, once they had sworn their loyalty to him. Exploitative and enforced evangelism was invented.
6. Extracted as much food as possible from his land, then took somebody else’s land by force. If any other species competed with his people for their food, he would do what he could to destroy those enemy species. Scorched-earth agriculture was invented.

The first dominator, the first evangelist, the first scorched-earth agriculturist, and, because of this aggregation of what tribes consider at least three individual types of insanity, became the first builder of a city-state. (p.201-203)

Comparison of trial characteristics and the structure and nature of City-States: (p.194, 198)

	Tribes	City-States
1.	Political independence	Political dominance
2.	Egalitarian structure	Established hierarchy: clear authority structures
3.	Getting their resources from renewable local sources	Acquiring resources through trade and conquest
4.	Having a unique sense of their own identity	Absorbing other cultures into their own identity
5.	Respecting the identity of other tribes	Genocidal warfare against others

City-State populations, however, have a steadily increasing food supply because of their ongoing exploitation and conquest of surrounding lands. As a result, their populations grow without limit until they hit the sudden wall of famine or plaque or the end of their energy resource.

Although they may be stable at the moment, all city-state governments dependent on oil and/or growth are inherently unstable in the long run, because of the cultural stories they are based upon. (p.210)

Flaws in a city-states organization

1. Because pre-democratic city-states are hierarchically organized, there is a concentration of power. In a younger culture, this results in a concentration of wealth and the existence of have-nots.
2. Because all nature is organized hierarchically, and this assumption makes it seem reasonable to engage in actions that foul and destroy the “inferior to humans” rest of the world.
3. Then we’ve wildly exceeded a sustainable population, damaged our atmosphere, and we are producing microbes that are more deadly to our species.
4. Pre-democracy city-state have always had a history of rising up to dominate for a brief period of times, and then collapsing. (p.1

Last hours of ancient sunlight  solutions (just copied and pasted Edgar on to this one )

• Look to the past: if we look to the past we see that all civilizations have fallen, all the empires have collapsed but we also see that for thousands of years we lived harmoniously with the planet, if we learn about what our ancestors did wrong and what they did right it will help us coexist with our planet.
• Women: while the younger culture has the idea that women are inferior than men, older cultures value women and see everybody as equal, some even venerate women and see them as sacred, thus they see the world as a mother.   
• Change our stories: the stories that we tell ourselves affect our beliefs, and our beliefs affect our actions.
• Everyone has to participate: people need to invest time to know what’s going on in the world and those who know must let others know. In young cultures T.V. and other things distract people from participating, in older cultures everyone had a responsibility, they had healers, hunters and everyone cooperated, they had a community to rely on and the community relied in its members.
• Sacred: we must stop destroying the world. Younger culture has made evident that it does not care about the world but instead it cares about it’s value. Older culture saw the planet as a sacred place, they took what they needed and nothing more, they saw everything in the world as an extension of themselves and they treated everything with respect.

View of Woman

• “woman uniquely bring life into the world, and it may not have been until humans moved from hunting/gathering to herding/agriculture that they began to understand genetics. Woman ran the show because they controlled life itself producing life from their bodies.”(pg.271)
• “ Converting the gods that were worshipped from female to male, and asserting control over fertility of women the same way they took over flock of sheep. Men took over testosterone behaviors took place beginnings of our young culture.....”(pg. 271)
• “Only woman in the Iroquois tribe could vote on most issues.....what will work for our children rather than who wins? or consideration of pride,power,or conquest.”
• “populations are exploding in almost every nation of the world where women are dominated, treated like cattle or goods, or exploited and controlled. ..... male vales “have many sons to build biggest army(have sex whenever you want, with whoever you want” (272)
• “ male domination equals populations explosion;relative male-female equality equals sustainable population.”(272)
• Solution: “give power back to woman in all realms, including the social, familial, religious, military, and business worlds.”(272)
• “Woman have more to say in their productive processes, when and how to have sex when and how to use birth control and so on... corresponding drop in population growth.(209) indonesia example
• “ catholic, muslim and hindu countries where women hold low status and little power, over populations is rampant. (209)
• “countries particularly those under Islamic law, women are not allowed out alone, must cover their bodies with clothing, cannot vote or run for office or hold power in any way outside the household and are essentially the property of men”(142)
• “Murder of woman who have disobeyed their fathers is not uncommon in muslim and hindu countries. ( example Nora)” (142)
• “marriage is viewed as as a business transaction, and goods are the woman- to be bought and sold as the father sees fit. (143)
• woman fault (147)  

Climate Change is one of the most important issues facing society in the 21st century.  People should not only rely on the scientific research which lead to the advanced technology to prevent global warming. Some advanced technologies are too expensive and could not effectively rectify to the damages that we have been done on our planet. People also realized that the culture is one of the root problems.  In an article of Impact of Climate Change on Cultural Heritage wrote that “There is a wealth of knowledge and understanding in the arts and humanities that is helping to broaden the debate on climate change by exploring cultural values, creative endeavors, ethics, aesthetic, critical reflection, and historical perspectives.”

Younger culture practices in the name of “free trade” and “modernization” are vulgar and destructive to the health of the human community. One of the problems with city-state structure is the excessive accumulation of wealth among the ruling or merchant classes. Daly suggests that when the difference between the wealth of the richest in a society and the poorest in a society exceed something between 10:1 and 20:1. By 1998, the top-earning 1 percent has as much income as the 100 million American with the lowest earnings.

In American Creed written by Michael Lind, says “American exceptionalism presents an intellectual problem.” America continues to be qualitatively different from other advanced industrial nations. Lipset wirtes, “It’s the most religious, optimistic, patriotic, rights-oriented, and individualistic.” As the result, the highest crimes rates and many people are incarcerated. “It’s the leader in upward mobility into professional and other high-status and elite occupations, but the least egalitarian among developed nations with respect to income distribution and providing welfare benefits. The emphasis on achievement, on meritocracy, is also tied to higher levels of deviant behavior and less support for underprivileged.”

City-state cultures are hierarchically organized, so there is a concentration of power. In a younger culture, this results in a concentration of wealth and the existence of have-nots. As the result, there are more populations, damaging to the atmosphere, endangering water supply, lesser food and losing more species. However, the tribal peoples are less greedy and more respecting to other tribes and the nature. So, they get food from their renewable local sources, cooperation and gender equality.

USA Vs UK Political Structure

http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/newsletters/26_1/impact.html

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/51853/michael-lind/the-american-creed-does-it-matter-should-it-change